what’s happening in my house these days

We’ve taken to playing Scrabble, or Scramble, as Hot Wheels calls it, over dinner.

I think it just might be the perfect game for Hot Wheels, since he’s what you might affectionately call a ‘reluctant reader,’ but he loves with a bright hot passion any game that involves points and scores. He’s not competitive at all, oh no. Scrabble is the best of all worlds, then, for him – word construction with points!!

This actually reminds me of a funny moment today in ballet class. My buddy Dorothy decided to opt out of one tricky across-the-floor combination, and as she ambled over to the side of the studio where our teacher was queuing up the music, I heard the teacher ask, “Wanna keep score?” The concept made me laugh – Dorothy over on the side of the studio with a clipboard, marking points off for mistakes, holding up big numbers with our final scores. I could almost hear the commentators murmuring as I crossed the floor – “Oooh, that’s going to cost her.”

Anyways, back to Scrabble. Let’s just have a closer look at the board from the other night:

Nothing too spectacular, here, although I was fond of a couple of our words, like ‘clique.’ Let’s see,we earned 34 points for that. Not too shabby. Now, let’s take a look at Hot Wheels’ word up there in the corner. ‘Zips.’ Four letters (the blank tile is an ’s’). 75 points.

75 points. Doh!

Now he’s obsessed with how many points he can earn. He’s all over the story about the carpenter who earned the highest points for one word (and subsequently one game) in tournament play. Which probably makes him one of the few first graders around to have a fondness for the word ‘quixotry.’ That’s just a hunch I have.